Valve has revealed that it has permanently banned over 40,000 accounts for employing cheating software to gain an unfair advantage over other Dota 2 players.
The cheat granted players access to internal client app data that is not displayed during normal gameplay, allowing them to gain a competitive advantage.
Dota 2 is a well-known multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA). It features a professional competitive scene with several events and leagues for players of all skill levels.
Dota 2 success is dependent on strategic thinking, quick reflexes, and teamwork.
An unhealthy competitive spirit drives some players to seek alternate means of gaining an advantage over their opponents, and an entire industry of third-party cheats exists to meet that desire.
The valve must discover and stop the usage of these cheats as soon as feasible in order to maintain a fair playing environment for everyone to enjoy.
Making a honeypot
In this situation, Valve created a patch that operated as a honeypot, capturing requests on places that the game app should not query or monitor.
“This patch established a honeypot: a portion of data inside the game client that would never be viewed during normal gaming, but that these exploits could read,” Valve adds.
“Each of the accounts banned today read from the client’s “secret” region, giving us considerable confidence that each ban was well-deserved.”
As the Dota 2 gaming community installed the patch, which is required to play online games, it was discovered that over 40,000 accounts were utilizing cheating software.
This makes it one of the most common cheats in the game’s history.
Valve says it decided to publicize this crackdown case, one of many in its fight against cheaters, to send a clear message to all players, including professionals who participate in official Valve events, that using software to read data from the client during playtime will result in permanent account bans.
It should be reminded that game cheats are frequently a risk because they might infect gamers’ systems with information-stealing viruses and bitcoin miners.
Security researchers uncovered malicious Dota 2 game types on Steam earlier this month, which used a hole in the game to infect gamers with malware.